quadroped

This video of littledog doing some terrain navigaion excersizes is just hilarious. We really don’t have any technological updates since last time we mentioned him, but you should watch the video anyway. [Evan] at botjunkie pointed out how tired littledog must be to absolutely collapse at the end of each run. We started out thinking that his comment was humorous, but the bot is obviously going into a tidy configuration for carrying. As we watched, we saw that [Evan] seemed very correct. Littlebot completely collapses at the end of each run, toward the end of the video, it doesn’t even bother to fold up nicely, sprawling out in a very lifelike pose of utter exhaustion. We don’t know if this is intentional, but we think it should be.

This little walking robot caught our eye. We’ve seen tons of 4 legged bots, but the design on this probably took more effort than the electronics. The design is radially symmetrical, it can walk in any direction, turn in place, and even walk upside down. The electronics weren’t forgotten though. This little bugger manages to pull a half our of use out of each battery charging. It communicates wirelessly with a custom dual Wiimote Nunchuck setup via XBEE modules. You can find much more technical details in the captions of the pictures. We’re not positive what processing power is hidden in the bot itself, but we know there’s an Arduino in one of the nunchucks. This might be the brains of the operation leaving the hardware on the bot simply to control the servos. We really like the arc-reactor-esque power display.